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6.2 Why do we use diaries in HCI research? 139

research is good at describing what people do, it is rather less effective at explaining
or understanding why they do it” (Alaszewski, 2006, p. 36). Surveys ask users to
recall information. This may be appropriate if you are asking users to recall infor-
mation that does not change over time, such as their date of birth, their income, or
other demographic data. Any data that is fluid, occurs only at a specific time, and
changes, such as mood, feeling, perception, time, or response, needs a very short-
time period between the occurrence of the event and the recording of the event.
Surveys can skew this type of data because, when users are asked to recall their
mood, their feeling, their response, or the time that an event took, their response to
a survey can be biased or incorrect. In some cases, users might simply forget the
details of what occurred. In other cases, an individual user's personality might bias
the response. If you ask different people to recall a similar challenging event in
their life, some will recall it with optimism and remember the event as being not so
bad. Others, who are pessimistic, may look back and remember the event as being
worse than it actually was. Differences in personality can skew the recollection. For
instance, an 80-year-old friend of one of the authors recalled that when he owned a
food store in the 1950s, he once had a robbery where a man held the employees up
with a gun and forced them to go into a meat locker for hours. The next comment
from the man was “You know, it was a hot day in July, so actually, a few hours in
the cooler wasn't too bad!” His personality made him look back on what was most
likely a traumatic event and remember a joke. A diary allows for a very small gap
between the occurrence of the event and the recording of the event. Ideally, this gap
is as close to zero as possible.
Diaries are a very good method for recording measurements that cannot be
accurately collected by experimental or observational means, or may result in
increased overall validity when used in conjunction with these other methods.
For example, diaries were utilized in studying why older individuals (50+) decide
to contribute to open source software projects for the first time (Davidson et al.,
2014). Direct observation or experimentation would not be useful approaches to
understand the motivations and benefits that the participants experienced from
their first forays into open source contributions. Over a 2-month period, partici-
pants received daily reminder emails, to fill out diary entries, asking about their
contributions to open source software, their motivations for doing so, the benefits
that they received, and any barriers stopping them from continuing to contribute
(Davidson et al., 2014).
While research methods such as experimental design focus on objectively
measuring human performance and automated data collection methods focus on
studying data that computers can collect unobtrusively, surveys and time diaries
ask users about themselves. How did they perceive a certain experience with the
computer or device? How did they feel? How did they respond? How much time
did it take them? How did it impact on their mood? When did they use it? How
did it impact on their feelings of self-efficacy? The diary elicits this information
in a way that neither outside observation nor automated data collection can. For
instance, how do you determine when a user intended to perform an action, but